WWDC09: IPhone 3G S makes life hard on Palm Pre

When I first heard that the Palm Pre was launching just two days before Apple was widely expected to announce the next iPhone, I thought it was a gutsy move. Now, it looks like it’s setting up the Pre for a tough comparison.

The Pre is a great phone and is, in my opinion, the closest to an iPhone in the smart phone world. It has some slowness issues, where application and actions lag a bit, but it’s got a lot of the iPhone’s tricks. The other major problem with it seems to be the battery life, which tends to run down quickly.

Now comes out the iPhone 3G S, which attacks some of those very same issues and exploits other areas, making the Pre look a little less shiny all of a sudden. The iPhone 3G S can launch applications and do processing work about two times faster, thanks to a beefed up processor and more RAM presumably.

And it’s got even better battery life. Apple is saying you can get up to 9 hours of battery life for Internet use, 50 percent better than the iPhone 3G. For video playback, you’re up to 10 hours, a little less than 50 percent better than the 7 hours on the previous model. Battery life may have been a problem for power iPhone 3G users but it’s looking less like the case for iPhone 3G S users. The Palm Pre, however, could use some more of that battery oomph.

Those are just two areas where the iPhone 3G S will quickly separate itself from the Pre. Add in video recording, voice commands, double the capacity, the huge app advantage and the ability to ride on AT&T’s network and the story gets more difficult for Palm.

Oh, and did I mention that the the 8 GB iPhone will sell for $99 starting today? That’s another burn.

That’s not to say Palm won’t find success. But Apple has done everything it needed to do to keep its edge, which it had going into today and just increased.

UPDATE: Sprint announced that it had a record selling weekend and first day for the Palm Pre. No particular numbers were announced but still a very successful launch, according to Sprint.